Manifested Consciousness

Who is God and what is God? I can’t possibly know.  I believe religions help us to focus on the concept of God, which is needed by humanity in order to not self-destruct, but religions are man’s creation.  Humans are flawed so errors are made in religion’s attempts to reach for God.

Science—because it can’t prove God exists—denies the possibility of God and credits randomness for creating the human species, our world, and the universe. Now that takes more ‘faith’ than I can muster.  As I study all that is ordered I see a requirement for consciousness to plan a process of selecting, sequencing and executing to achieve the desired result.

Slabs of metal, nuts and bolts, pieces of glass and rolls of leather will never randomly assemble themselves into a car no matter how much time is given; flour, sugar, eggs and chocolate pieces will never randomly assemble into cookies under any circumstances.

The human species, our world and the universe are the most carefully ordered sequences that can be imagined.

I have no faith that randomness yields complex order—it requires intentionality. 

I don’t know who or what God is, but I believe the order that brought us and all that is into existence has been the manifestation of a consciousness capable of bringing order. I’m content to call that God.

A New Axial Age?

Has the modern era brought us to a new Axial Age?  Some say so, but what does it mean?  The German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term ‘Axial Age’ in 1949 when he noted that during the period between 800-200 BC there was a shift in how humanity viewed itself.  A turn as if on an axis—a change in consciousness that allowed civilization to develop.  Prior to the shift, tribalism was the dominant form of social organization.  The general characteristics were: small populations closely related, closed to outer influences, lacking individualized thinking, total submission to the group (ultra-conformity), with non-members of the tribe usually seen as ‘enemy’.

During the first Axial Age there was a revolution in human thought.  Independently in most clusters of humanity (China, India, Persia, Judaea, Greece and Rome) there was a change in consciousness that produced great advances in intellectual, philosophical and religious thinking.  Great men arose to define a ‘way of life’ (Confucius and La-Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses and the Prophets, Socrates and Plato).  In each cluster there was some version of The Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others what you would have them do unto you’.  Humanity had moved from the isolation of tribalism to recognizing the necessity of cooperation for mutual benefit.  It was a huge leap, laying the groundwork for civilization to emerge.

How is this relevant to today?  The modern era has brought tremendous technological change.  From 1900 to 2018 we’ve leapt from horse and buggy transportation to rockets to the moon and back; in communications, then the telephone was new and cumbersome and today we carry it around in our pocket not only for conversations but also to navigate highways and instantly obtain limitless information . . . it isn’t the same world!   In the early 1900s we were just awakening to the terrifying destructive power we held, erupting in a World War with heretofore-unimagined armament—which escalated to nuclear arsenals capable of destroying all life on planet earth.

This new world requires a shift or change in how we see the world; another revolution in human thought is needed.  War has been the way to settle disputes since man first walked the earth.  It is no longer a viable option—viable means: capable of working successfully.  There is no ‘success’ with nuclear weapons.  Until we ventured into outer space and looked back on this tiny planet in the vast universe, we still believed (although science told us otherwise) we lived in a limitless static world where earth was the center of it all with sun and moon and stars revolving around us, as God sat on a cloud watching our every move. 

That isn’t the reality.  We are a dynamic evolving interacting singular unit, dependent upon each other for survival.  Early in the Bible (Deut. 30:19) God says:  “I have set before you life and death . . . choose life.”  God left it up to us. Whether or not you believe in the Bible or God, that clearly is a statement to us today.

The choosing of death is to continue to war, enlarge the nuclear arsenal, and deny reality.  The way to ‘choose life‘ is to embrace our interconnectedness, change our consciousness to find the way for humanity to work together in peace and build the world. . . thus bringing on a second Axial Age.

I once again quote Teilhard de Chardin:

 

                       “The Age of Nations is past,

     The task before us now, if we would not perish

                              Is to build the earth”

YouTube Song

My daughter sent me a message about a song on YouTube, “My World Needs You” . . . so beautiful . . . so true.     Listen to it.

Our secular world has moved away from God; and the world is in crisis!  It is God that focuses us on the good.  Religions—so needed to help us keep God in mind—have alienated so many thinking people because they have misinterpreted God and encouraged an absolutist mentality that insists, ‘only this way is right’.  Our God is the God of Love and infinite diversity, not a god of vengeance nor a god of magic, bestowing special favors on those who ‘pray correctly’. 

In rebelling against those false concepts many have rejected not only those concepts, but also God.  The error is in human misinterpretation, not in God’s being.   God is God of this incredibly wondrous complex Universe . . . mystery beyond our knowing; the source of all that is good and true.

Consider the ending statement in Genesis 1:31, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

Indeed, ‘my world needs you right now’.  Too long we’ve been shortsighted, failing to heed your directive to ‘love one another’.  In seeing and hearing how, through the recent tragedies of hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and mass killings, people have reached out to help and comfort one another . . . in this we see the face of God.

Nature Unbalanced

Hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, earthquakes and tornados, mountains sides ablaze, wars and terrorism—it is not God’s wrath but man’s refusal to heed God’s precepts that creates this chaos
. . . nature exists in a delicate balance, human actions have unbalanced that balance and God mourns the destruction.  The saving words are “Thy will be done” and they have been ignored.

The voice of the Lord is in nature and nature howls from the pain man has inflicted upon her.  Nature is warning us, calling us to awaken.  In the earliest pages of the Bible God says, “I lay before you life and death, choose life”.  We make the ‘for life choice’ by following The Way of Jesus which is love and forgiveness—but instead we have ignored that imperative and chosen greed and selfishness . . . and the earth groans as man’s choices unbalance the balance, bringing destruction.

We need God in our life, our world and our consciousness.

Once again I invoke the contemporary version of  Psalm 29:

We have not kept your precepts, Lord.

We have not shepherded the earth by your formulation,

We have plundered for private gain

            and trampled the lowly to amass profits.

Ascribe to the Lord, O world leaders,

            ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.

Ascribe to the Lord the reverence due his name

            and take heed of the splendor of his holiness.

The voice of the LORD is heard in Nature,

            the God of glory thunders.

The Lord gives us warning as we despoil the earth;

            the voice of the Lord breaks the cedars

            and howls the winds.

The voice of the Lord shakes the mountains

            and strikes with flashes of lightening.

The voice of the Lord twists the oaks

            and strips forests bare.

Look, listen and know!

The Lord sits enthroned over the waters and land,

The Lord reigns King forever.

The Lord gives warning to his people!

Heed his precepts and principles

            lest man’s choices bring destruction
            to this wondrous earth and all its inhabitants!

        

The Letter 'o'

The difference between ‘God’ and ‘good’ is the letter ‘o’.

In all that I say and do, in all that I think and write, that which is of prime importance is God—not the god of the images we have rendered, the theologies we have developed, nor the religions we have created—but the God of the reality of our human existence.  It isn’t of concern to me what church, synagogue or temple you attend, nor even the images and institutions you may have rejected in coming to unbelief.   What is of concern is how intentionally we each live our lives.  Are we consciously seeking ‘the good’?  I believe that is God’s concern also—many Bible passages state that rather than burnt offerings (sacrifice and ritual), God wants clean hearts; and in Matthew 7:21 we find, "Not everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of my Father.”

 I believe we are created in the image of God—but most of us have a very murky idea of what that image is.  God is so beyond our ability to comprehend, we cannot know God—and those who are sure they do know, are wrong!  In our unknowing we have constructed multiple and massive falsehoods that have caused great human suffering and led many to reject the concept of a God.

What I believe about God is not only ‘God is good’, but that ‘God is in all goodness’.   You may say, “What is goodness? . . .Who can say with any certainty? . . . Isn’t it just a matter of opinion?”   But I would argue, “No!  What we like, what we champion or what we want is a matter of opinion, but what is fundamentally good is implanted in our soul and can be recognized and agreed upon when honestly evaluated.

My daughter sings a lullaby to her little one each night as she tucks her in—that is good.

A neighbor yells loudly and harshly at his son whenever he messes up—that is not good.

Genesis tells us that as God created each element of existence, “God saw that it was good”.  The issue here is not the ‘how’ of it, but the issue is of the goodness of it.  Life is the essential good; ‘to be’ opens the door to experiencing, feeling, knowing and understanding. 

What follows is that ‘the good’ is what sustains and enhances life, both materially and spiritually; while what is not good is whatever destroys life either physically or psychologically.  If we back up all the way to humanity’s first recognition of the basic good of relationships we find some form of what we call the ‘Golden Rule’ that has appeared in every society and religion.  ‘Do unto others what you would have them do unto you’.

 When we earnestly seek God, we seek the good; and when we seek the good, we are seeking God.   God contains only the good, and too, God is contained within all that is good.

* * *

Are We There Yet?

All religions are fallible—

Each structured by fallible men.

Yet each one discovers

some aspect of the Divine

that leads its followers

on a numinous path to God.

But oh how rocky the path

and circuitous the route!

Have faith, God is patient,
Evolution is measured in eons.

Heed His Precepts

In his 2015 Encyclical On the Care of our Common Home Pope Francis spoke of “irresponsible use of the earth” and exhorted all people to take heed of Climate Change.

On a regular basis now, we see record-setting storms: tornados, floods, windstorms and hurricanes.  The ice caps are melting and oceans rising.  NOAA & NASA released their global temperature data: 15 of 17 of the hottest years on record have come since 2000, and 2016 was the hottest ever.

Presently uncontrollable wildfires are raging in our country’s Heartland, in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas over a million acres have been incinerated—this, following years of severe drought.  Also this week in New York, windstorms sent trees crashing on homes, cars and power lines.

 When will we wake up to the reality of this threat?  Our planet is in crisis!  The key to our world’s smooth functioning is equilibrium—our careless actions have upset the balance.

Pope Francis’ Encyclical made me think of Psalm 29 in which David was addressing the leaders of his time, telling them to be mindful of the mightiness of God and His great power in nature.

In my contemporary version I change from David’s voice to that of Pope Francis, exhorting our leaders to better care for our Common Home and attend to what is happening with climate change, for we are failing to honor God in Nature.

It begins with a confession—

Psalm 29  (B. S-C contemporary version)

We have not kept your precepts, Lord.

We have not shepherded the earth by your formulation,

We have plundered for private gain

            and trampled the lowly to amass profits.

Ascribe to the Lord, O world leaders,

            ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.

Ascribe to the Lord the reverence due his name

            and take heed of the splendor of his holiness.

The voice of the LORD is heard in Nature,

            the God of glory thunders.

The Lord gives us warning as we despoil the earth;

            the voice of the Lord breaks the cedars

            and howls the winds.

The voice of the Lord shakes the mountains

            and strikes with flashes of lightening.

The voice of the Lord twists the oaks

            and strips forests bare.

Look, listen and know!

The Lord sits enthroned over the waters and land,

The Lord reigns King forever.

The Lord gives warning to his people!

Heed his precepts and principles

            lest man’s choices bring destruction

            to this wondrous earth and all its inhabitants!

Third Stanza Reflection

This is my final reflection from the Trinity Prayer (see two prior entries)

            --as Sanctifier, ever-present Holy Spirit, The Divine Milieu enveloping

            us in your love and giving guidance to those who seek your council.

We live in the Divine Milieu—within God who surrounds and permeates all that is.  The dictionary definition of Spirit is:  ‘the vital principle or animating force within living beings’.  To sanctify ‘is to recognize as holy’.  God, the third way you manifest yourself to us is as Holy Spirit.  It is you, God, who calls us to realize the sacred wonder of life and our world.  You made humankind to evolve in consciousness, gradually awakening to what and who we are—you offer guidance, never imposing it—that is the basis of our free will.

We struggle to give expression to the intangible . . . elusive, yet more real than all we can touch, weigh and measure.  Spirit has neither shape nor form; without parameters, it simply IS—like light and breath; a non-material dimension that can’t be captured and contained; the ‘within’ (Teilhard’s word) that permeates our material being and animates it.  Is that not life itself which we cannot fully comprehend?  We experience it, know it’s reality by living it, recognize its presence or absence, can enumerate its requirements, chart its functions and its effects, but cannot explain the why of it by the science we have developed.  If we can’t even understand life although we live it, why does it surprise us when we can’t understand God? 

God, you are mystery beyond our capacity to fathom but what we do know is that we exist and live on a planet that we didn’t create yet continue to shape by our collective action, located within a galaxy dwarfed by an unimaginable expanding universe . . . and that awareness draws me to awe and thanksgiving for the wonder of it.  Thank you, source of all being.

Over the centuries of our development men have tried to ‘capture’ god with images, explanations and rules of exclusivity. As our knowledge increased (mainly by science that weighs and measures everything), the explanations of gods seemed no longer believable for they divided people and sought to impose shape and form upon spirit.  Many people began to conclude: “since there are so many conflicting views and we can’t prove god’s existence, god must be an illusion.”

The ‘within’ in the human is consciousness, said to be the ‘spark of God’ that produces thought.  Thought reaches for understanding—(to know all: all of life and time and being) and to love—(seek goodness for self, others and all).  With our consciousness and free will, humanity does and will continue to create the world we occupy.  We reflect God’s love by using our freedom to choose only ‘the good’ and create a world in harmony.  (A work-in-progress)

A new understanding of God is needed in the 21^st Century.

What are we to salvage from the many ways of explaining God?

            God is Spirit and Spirit is Being itself.

            --Life—we have it (till we don’t??—no certainty of ‘after’)

            --Light—is everywhere all at once

            --Breath—we explain about oxygen and circulation

                        . . . but why and how does fragile breath sustain life?

            --Consciousness/Thought—expands exponentially

                        . . . and calories and chemicals can’t justify it.

            --Love—the desire for goodness for another

It is said: God is Love; God is Life; God is Truth; God is Being

The Bible quotes God’s self-identification as:  I AM that I AM

  

Middle Stanza Thoughts

This is a continuation of my former July 17 entry wherein, while in Hawaii, I explored the deeper thoughts stirred by the Trinity prayer, I continue with the prayer’s middle stanza:

            --as Savior, you clothed yourself in human flesh and entered

            time as Jesus to show us how we are to live.

God, you created matter—the solid stuff of being that has weight and dimension.  Teilhard has told us: in Being there is a 'within' and a 'without'.  The within—the Word and Spirit—preceded materiality.  At the appointed time your creativity brought forth mass and form—the without—and life, in an evolutionary process that revealed endless possibilities—reaching for the form most appropriate for containing the seed of spirit.  The mechanism of the process was that of complexity-consciousness:  a progression from simple to complex (the without) and ever deepening consciousness (the within).  Through eons of time, slowly evolving to eventually produce the human form that came to know itself and emerge from a primitive state to become a communicative, creative being—developing language and utilizing tools to shape their environment.  Slowly the light of awareness increased—knowing without knowing they knew—they were to gather together to organize and build while paying tribute to the unknown beyond their comprehension.  Mankind emerged as an altogether new species.  Beginning with limited awareness, the ‘without’ received more attention than the within—managing food and shelter, refining communications, gathering together to establish roles and rules and rituals, growing in awareness that there was something greater than what they could see and feel and touch. Looking backward from the present to some four thousand years ago we see a people gathering their tribes into a nation with a central focus binding them together; their belief in One God, creator of all that is.

When outer and inner development was sufficiently established to sustain fuller consciousness of meaning and direction, You, God, entered time as Jesus, accepting both the process and the limits of being human to demonstrate the full measure of human potential—the power and goal of our freedom: to create a world of peace and love by acknowledging our interdependence and together willing that our world be so.

Jesus came into the world in a male body full of strength, courage and intelligence, with a feminine soul living the truth of love, compassion and self-sacrifice.  The ‘without’ of Jesus was here but briefly, while the ‘within’ remains in Spirit.  God, you aren’t ‘out there’ or ‘up there’ beyond our reckoning but right here in our midst, waiting for us to discover you, not in the many conflicting ways men have designed you, but as you truly are.